Say Bob tosses his $n+1$ fair coins and Alice tosses her $n$ fair coins. Lets assume independent coin tosses. Now after all the $2n+1$ coin tosses one wants to know the probability that Bob has gotten more heads than Alice.
The way I thought of it is this : if Bob gets $0$ heads then there is no way he can get more heads than Alice. Otherwise the number of heads Bob can get which allows him to win is anything in the set $\{1,2,\dots,n+1\}$. And if Bob gets $x$ heads then the number of heads that Alice can get is anything in the set $\{0,1,2,..,x-1\}$. So\begin{align}P(\text{Bob gets more heads than Alice})&= \sum_{x=1}^{n+1} \sum_{y=0}^{x-1} P( \text{Bob gets x heads }\cap \text{Alice gets y heads }) \\[0.2cm]&= \sum_{x=1}^{n+1} \sum_{y=0}^{x-1} \left(C^{n+1}_x \frac{1}{2}^{x} \frac{1}{2}^{n+1-x}\right)\left( C^n_y \frac{1}{2}^y \frac {1}{2}^{n-y}\right)\\[0.2cm]& = \sum_{x=1}^{n+1} \sum_{y=0}^{x-1} \frac{C^{n+1}_x C^n_y}{2^{2n+1}}\end{align}
- How does one simplify this?
Apparently the answer is $\frac{1}{2}$ by an argument which looks like this, Since Bob tosses one more coin that Alice, it is impossible that they toss both the same number of heads and the same number of tails. So Bob tosses either more heads than Alice or more tails than Alice (but not both). Since the coins are fair, these events are equally likely by symmetry, so both events have probability 1/2.